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The story so far, 2013

It's been a while. I've purposefully not tried to stick to any
update schedule, but I guess I could have written something
earlier, already. So far, there have been two larger, yet not
all that visible changes to Piperka this year.

But before I go into that, I should tell of an old bug. I redid
the account and login handling code two years ago. After that,
the new account creation code discarded the user's email instead
of storing it. Please go check your account information page
and check that you have an email address there. You'd need it
for password recovery.

The rest of this post is going to get, unavoidably, more
technical. In March, I introduced support for banner uploads.
Prior to that, they were submitted as plain old text links. It
worked, but it was a rather ungainly way of doing it. The
comics have banners submitted more frequently now, so it seems
that it solved a problem. I had to clean up quite a bit of old
code to make that work, starting with how I was calling Mason.
And since I'm using AJAX submits instead of plain old Web 1.0
submits, I had to use File API. I opted for
simpler code and just tell older browsers that banner uploads
are not supported.

The second, more recent, change is a bit fancier. I made the
listing pages (top, browse and profile) navigation use AJAX
calls and History
API. The (un)subscribe buttons use AJAX now, too. It was
remarkably easy to leave the old code path in place for browsers
without working History API support. All I needed to do was to
not add event hooks to the navigation links and let the old
links work as is. By my rough testing, it looks like I made
page load time drop by 25% and the page loads won't flash
content anymore. I suppose I could further squeeze a pageful of
comics to MTU, but that's a project for some other day.

Both changes introduced some bugs that some of you ran into and
thankfully told me about. They have been fixed.

I solved a few annoying bits along the way and got to practise
some HTML5 techniques. If I had to work on invisible parts of
Piperka, I suppose that making the crawler errors easier to
manage would have been better used time. But my whim took me
here.

If you're interested in even more details than this, then I
should remind you that Piperka's source code is
available. Of which not all that many people are aware,
even those who have contacted me about technical matters. I
ought to add a link to a page about the source code to Piperka's
templates.